David Rosenthal: commitment

Transcript context

…Boy, is timing everything. Oh man, is it ever. The funny thing is, you would think that in hindsight now this is so obvious. It’s like, “Oh, I don’t have to rely on users randomly deciding to open up my app and see what’s going on. I can now send them notifications and prompt them to do this messaging. Duh! Why don’t we just build all of AIM (AOL Instant Messenger) and ICQ instead of just away messages?” Funnily enough, at first Jan is like, “Oh, this is great! Now, I will update WhatsApp so that every time you change your status, it’ll just broadcast the away message out to everyone. ” So he couldn’t actually message. He was only broadcasting away messages. We should take a moment here. I was fortunate to be living through this era and be very, very obsessed with the iPhone as I was starting to create apps. You might be wondering why didn’t AIM come to the iPhone? Well, they were. AIM was an early, early partner for Apple. They had an app on the App Store very early. I want to say iOS 3, this early. The other app that really came out really early that was originally, I can’t remember if it was a flash website or and HTML5 website, a really early one, but it’s called Meebo, and it was a cross-service messaging client, where you could have AIM and ICQ, and it subscribed to all those different APIs.…

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